UPDATE: C64 Emulator has yet again been pulled from the App Store for sneaking in an easter egg that allows the execution of code in a BASIC interpreter. See the end of the post for details.

Finally, a Commodore 64 emulator for the iPhone. The application, previously rejected by Apple, has at last been approved and brings some classic 8-bit action to your pocket.

The emulator is unlike most others in that it is legal. Usually when old (and new) consoles and computers are recreated in software, the emulator itself is fine, but the games played on them are either pirated or in a gray area, where the original authors or copyright holders cannot be found.

C64 emulator only offers legit games, and as such is a little starved for titles. You pay $5 and get five games: Artic Shipwreck, Dragon’s Den, Jack Attack, Jupiter Lander and Lemans. More games can be bought from within the app itself and are added to a decidedly slick and non-8-bit-looking library. Controlling everything is dome via on-screen representations of joysticks and buttons, and as this is an actual emulator, you get all the low-fi goodness of the original code.

Update:

In order to win Apple’s approval the developer Manomio pulled the BASIC interpreter from the application. It turns out that it was still in there and could be activated with a few keystrokes. It took all of a few minutes for Apple to hear about this and pull the application yet again. For a developer that went to such lengths to secure copyright permissions, this seems a bit dumb. From the developer’s blog:

Unfortunately Apple this night pulled the C64 App from the App Store. We had agreed with Apple to remove basic from the application, but as we believed it would be possible to convince Apple to let it in later on, we left it in the app to be activated remotely by us when we had “go” from Apple.

[A] new version has been submitted to Apple, and we can only hope Apple will appreciate our efforts to apply the changes they need in order to put it back on.